‘Mobility’ proposed for legacy ATSC broadcast
The cell phone market isn’t “what we are after,” said Raj Karamchedu, Legend Silicon’s chief operating officer and vice president of product marketing. Instead, the company sees aftermarket car TV devices as the “low-hanging fruit” in the U.S. market.
Legend Silicon, which claims to be a leading chip supplier for China’s fixed digital TV market, is bringing its patent-pending SuperTV technology to the United States. The company originally developed the technology, based on maximal-ratio combining (MRC) diversity reception, to solve specific problems—the diversity issues in single-carrier modes—in China’s national Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) system.
Now, Legend Silicon believes its SuperTV technology also can solve what many in the industry have long perceived as the current Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) broadcast standard’s inherent problems: no signal reception in blind spots and signal disturbance at vehicular speeds. The ATSC system, based on the 8-VSB modulation scheme, is known to be “notoriously unusable” for reaching mobile users, as the entire payload bandwidth is transmitted in a single frequency, observed Lin Yang, CTO and co-founder of Legend Silicon.
Aware of that problem, U.S. stakeholders have already developed ATSC-M/H (ATSC-Mobile/Handheld), an extension to the current ATSC system. ATSC M/H is built to overcome issues such as Doppler shift and multipath radio interference in mobile environments.
But if Legend Silicon’s chip proves to work well in high-speed car TV applications in the U.S. by receiving the legacy ATSC signals, the company believes it will have a shot at cornering the car TV market before ATSC M/H chips—available from companies such as LG and Siano Mobile—can dominate.
For now, Legend Silicon says it has no plans to compete in the ATSC M/H market. But the company, which has scheduled a live mobile-TV demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, fully intends to compete in the legacy ATSC market, where nobody else has a similar slate of diversity and mobile reception solutions for U.S. terrestrial digital TV markets.
Impact on ATSC M/H?
It’s too early to tell how Legend Silicon’s pursuit of the U.S. mobile TV market with a legacy ATSC-based solution will affect ATSC M/H. Notably, the company thus far has only proved its concept for a mobile version of a four-antenna car TV system using Altera’s FPGA board.
The use of multiple antennas combined with power consumption demands will surely make it tough for Legend Silicon’s solution to be designed into cell phones, for which ATSC M/H is gunning. In a car with dozens of built-in antennas, however, “it’s perfectly acceptable” to have a four-antenna solution, noted Legend Silicon’s Karamchedu.
Leveraging what Legend Silicon developed for China
Legend Silicon’s Yang, an EE professor at Tsinghua University from 2001 to 2006, helped invent the core technology of China’s national terrestrial TV standard, DTMB, and helped Legend Silicon become the first to develop and mass-produce DTMB chip in China. “By leveraging our MRC-based single-carrier diversity technology now used in China, we are confident that we can offer effective solutions to the legacy ATSC system for car TVs,” Yang claimed.
Will Strauss, president of market researcher Forward Concepts, acknowledged Legend Silicon’s credibility in China’s digital TV chip market. While Legend Silicon claims to offer superior signal reception quality on an FPGA prototype, however, “it won’t be clear until after CES whether they have market traction,” said Strauss.
Forward Concepts forecasts that ATSC M/H receiver chips in the cell phone market will grow from a projected 115,000 units in 2012 to 480,000 units by 2015. The company does not break out the automotive category, since its focus is on phones.
As with the mobile TV market in general, few are expecting any significant volume market for ATSC M/H in cell phones. Strauss said, “Perhaps laptop/tablet modules and automotive will be the faster-growing ATSC M/H markets, with aftermarket receivers hitting the automotive market first.”
Asked how big the automotive mobile TV market will be, Karamchedu said, “We don’t have the answer.” He estimates the potential total available market for car TVs in the United States to be around 30 million new cars and 200 million aftermarket cars.
If Qualcomm’s now-defunct MediFlo system and the DVB-H digital terrestrial mobile TV market are any indication, consumer adoption of mobile TV in general could be very slim.
But Karamchedu stressed, “Our customers—car TV vendors—are very bullish about making this happen.” He risks this prediction because Legend Silicon’s approach enables the reception of already ubiquitous free-over-the-air terrestrial digital TV signals in the United States, rather than depending on the build-out of a whole new infrastructure.
Knowing the enthusiasm of several aftermarket car TV vendors, Karamchedu said, “The validity of the car TV market is there. To us, that’s good enough.”
Media tablets with an ATSC receiver?
Whether Legend Silicon can play in the media tablet market is uncertain at best, although the company believes tablet manufacturers in Schenzhen are looking at the adoption of ATSC-based mobile TV reception as a differentiator for their devices.
Again, as long as U.S. consumers are more accustomed to buying and downloading a movie or a TV episode via the iTunes store, at Amazon.com or via cable TV services to watch it on media tablets, the advantage of receiving terrestrial digital TV signals “for free” can easily elude most consumer’s notice. It will require some education.
Legend Silicon’s Yang offered another selling point for his company’s mobile TV solution in the U.S. “Family members can still bring in and use in the car regular iPads without free-over-the-air TV reception capability. But our car TV, capable of receiving the free-over-the-air ATSC signals, can become a ‘TV hot spot,’ allowing those media tablets to receive movies for video via Wi-Fi in the car.”
It’s feasible, but seems like a pretty convoluted process, especially if what you’re after is an episode of “ CSI: Sheboygan.”
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